KIRO 7 Eyewitness News in the US has run a story revealing that "an alarming number of Apple brand iPod MP3 players have suddenly burst into flames and smoke, injuring people and damaging property". The station says:

It took more than 7-months for KIRO 7 Consumer Investigator Amy Clancy to get her hands on documents concerning Apple's iPods from the Consumer Product Safety Commission because Apple's lawyers filed exemption after exemption. In the end, the CPSC released more than 800 pages which reveal, for the very first time, a comprehensive look that shows, on a number of occasions, iPods have suddenly burst into flames, started to smoke, and even burned their owners.

One woman who was burned by a Shuffle said "she was told by an Apple customer service representative that her burn was an isolated incident".

The 800 pages of information that KIRO obtained included just "15 burn and fire-related incidents blamed by iPod owners on their iPods".

The story says the Consumer Product Safety Commission conducted a preliminary investigation and decided that with more than 175 million iPods sold, "the number of incidents is extremely small in relation to the number of products produced, making the risk of injury very low."

The risk may even be lower for iPods than it is with other electronics products, which don't sell in large enough volumes for the problem to become visible.

The real question is whether iPod owners should be warned about the risk.

Clancy asked that same question of Apple: should its customers know about this? Apple refused to comment, and refused to answer all of the other questions Clancy has been asking of the company since November.

But what frustrates people is summed up by Tami Mooney

who called Apple to complain. She claims she got the run-around. "I was so frustrated because frankly, they didn't care. They didn't care that my child was burned. They didn't care about the possibilities that other children were burned."

You'd have thought that including a warning and replacing a small number of overheating iPods -- maybe as few as one in 10 million -- would be a more attractive proposition than the potential risk of facing a lawsuit over the sort of tragedy that everyone would regret.

* Not in the KIRO story: Apple has stated that "batteries in the iPod nano (1st generation) sold between September 2005 and December 2006, may overheat and prevent the iPod nano from working and deform it." The support note says "the issue has been traced to a single battery supplier" and tells customers to "contact AppleCare for repair or replacement".